My third class at Advanced English!!

I liked this class because most of the students were speaking English in all the activities I developed. In this class, I did not use very controlled activities because my tutor teacher wants the student to develop fluency and to improve their pronunciation. That is why, in most of the classes, I develop different speaking activities in which the students are sharing their ideas. This is one of the reasons I have when I say that I like to work with this group. As you know, they are advanced students and when there is something interesting to talk about, they give their best!

The students were studying the conditional clauses, so I brought to the class the song “If I were a boy”. The students really liked this song because I created a discussing. In this discussion, girls were sharing some ideas about what they would/wouldn`t do if they were boys. On the other hand, boys were sharing the things they would/wouldn`t do if they were girls. As you can imagine, they were saying funny things, but what I like is that they shared their ideas.

These are some of the things they were saying:
BOYS: If I were a girl …
I would wear sexy clothes.
I would have a lot of boyfriends.
I would go out at night with my boyfriend.

GIRLS: If I were a boy….
I would be faithful.
I wouldn`t use drugs or drink beers.
I would go to parties at night.
Well, they were saying many other things, but I can`t write all of them. For me, this was the part of the class in which the students were more motivated to participate.

I also, pasted on the board some charts with some strophes from the song. In this case, girls were saying if what the song said about boys was true. Then, boys had the opportunity to explain the reasons why they do those things, and some other students said that they are not like that.
I think that the part of the class that was not so well was the warm-up activity because the students were cheating. I asked them to make two teams, and I gave them an object. They had to pass this object to the student that was behind them, but before passing the object, they had to do something else like: touch a desk that was in the center of the classroom, jump two times, etc. The last student was going to run to a desk I put in front of the class, and this student had the opportunity to take one piece of paper that had an incomplete sentence (If I were rich…….). If this person gave the complete sentence, his/her group had 1 point. I lost too much time because as I said before, they were cheating. Some students were not doing what I asked them to do before passing the object.

There was one activity that I noticed students liked a lot. I gave to each student a picture with a famous person (Hittler, Einstein, Brad pitt, JLo, etc). I asked them to write a question they would ask to this person if he/she were alive or if they could talk to this person. They were saying great ideas about what they would ask, and what I liked is that they were using the conditionals very well. In this way, I noticed that my directions were clear and that I had reached my objective.

If I teach that lesson again, I will assign more rules in order to play the game I developed in the warm-up activity. I just told them that they had two opportunities to say a correct sentence without help from their classmates in order to get the point. Now, I am thinking that if I use it again I will add some penalties to the people that do not do the troubles they have to do in order to pass the object. Another thing I would do is to give the group that was not cheating one point.